Americaís prison system has become its largest mental health facility.

More than half of the 2.2 million prisoners in federal, state and county jails have mental heath problems, a 2006 Justice Department study found. For female prisoners, itís more like three-quarters.

But while locking up mentally ill people for crimes they've committed is a scandal across the country, Massachusetts goes one better:†Here, the state†imprisons people with mental illness who have not been charged with a crime.

Under the stateís civil commitment law, people with†mental illness or addiction, or their families, can ask a judge to get them help. The judge may then send them to one of the stateís few mental health/substance abuse treatment centers. If there are no available beds, as is often the case, they are sent to a prison Ė Bridgewater State Hospital†for men, MCI-Framingham for women. Those are places of punishment, not treatment.

Thatís how Joshua Messier, 23, wound up at Bridgewater. A paranoid schizophrenic, he was pushed into the civil commitment system after a private mental health facility discharged him. He died at Bridgewater, after guards with little or no mental health training bound his hands and feet to a bed, apparently causing a heart attack in the process. A state medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, the Boston Globe reported.

Gov. Deval Patrick responded to coverage of Messierís death by declaring that kind of use of restraints must stop. He added that another abhorrent practice, keeping pregnant female prisoners in shackles, even as they are delivering their babies, must also end. Sen. Karen Spilka, D-Ashland, has filed a bill prohibiting unsafe treatment of pregnant prisoners, but Patrick shouldnít wait for legislation before ordering more humane treatment in the prisons heís charged with administering.

As for the larger issue, Patrick told an audience in Boston last week that "treating those with substance abuse as prisoners is wrong. We must make the beds available for these individuals to receive proper treatment in proper settings."

Patrick has called for 64 new substance abuse treatment beds so that patients civilly committed wonít be forced into prisons, but thatís not nearly enough. The epidemic of opiate addiction requires a much more ambitious state response.

Beacon Hill seems to be nearing a tipping point on corrections, mental health and substance abuse reforms long pushed by advocates. Senate President Therese Murray, who leaves office at the end of this year, has made mental health and addiction treatment a priority, which is a hopeful sign.

Josh Messier is just one of countless Bay State residents who have been victims of a system that fails those most in need of help. Thereís no single, or simple, answer for those plagued by mental illness and addiction, but officials are at last convinced that prison does far more harm than good. This must be the year Massachusetts stops locking up sick people who have committed no crime.